


Past Care

by bananasandroses (achuislemochroi)



Series: Whofic [38]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Implied Relationships, Insanity, Tenth Doctor Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-18
Updated: 2009-10-18
Packaged: 2018-01-24 06:58:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1595795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achuislemochroi/pseuds/bananasandroses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How can one be haunted by a person who’s not dead?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Past Care

_Past cure I am, now reason is past care,  
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;_

— Sonnet 147, by William Shakespeare

  


It takes longer than he expects, but nevertheless it happens eventually.

Everywhere he goes, she follows him.  A ghost?  No, not quite; she’s still alive, after all, or had been when he’d left her.  A memory, then.  But one he could do without, because everywhere and everywhen it’s the same old story.  Every time he lets someone down it’s her face he sees, her eyes after he’d broken his hearts (and hers) by answering a question with a question and not with the words he’d longed to say.

_Does it need saying?_ he’d asked her, refusing to say the three words to make the parting as painless as possible – for this was fixed, he _couldn’t_ change it – whilst at the same time slightly incredulous that she should need to ask.  He’d done – and said – just about everything other than those three tiny words; surely she _knew_?

His pain for Rose has always been different to that for Gallifrey, finessed through guilt and love and a refusal to commit her to the past into an exquisite form of torture.  But when he watched her kiss the mirror-image of himself (for he knew what he had said; how could he _not_?) he could barely believe a living thing could feel this much agony and still remain standing, still be breathing and alive.

He’d run away, he knew, as much for himself as for Donna or his ship.  He’d run because that was the only option available to him, run before he could destroy anybody else by trying to keep Rose with him.

And this, this _madness_ , is his punishment.

His senses are overwhelmed by her, which is impossible when she’s a universe apart from him, and he cannot bear it.  Every time he sees a couple kissing he is back on that beach and sees instead, in his mind’s eye, his Rose kissing him but not kissing _him_.  Each time the pain comes fresh and raw, akin to a blow directly on a bruise, and each time it cuts him down.  He finds himself almost wishing that he’d never met Rose Tyler, never let himself fall for her.  And he cannot stop himself thinking, always and above everything, that he should never have let her go.

The madness tempts him with promises of stability, of peace, of an end to the unceasing grief and rage and pain.  And he fights it for a span with everything that’s in him, as he knows that to give in to it is to obliterate himself.  But her eyes and face and voice still haunt him, both everywhere and everywhen, and he is tired.  Tired of always being the one to sacrifice himself, tired of the soul-destroying loneliness that has been his constant companion for so long.  He is tired, so tired, and old.

And the next time the madness tempts him, cloaked as it is in the form of the one thing he wants in all the universe, his mind breaks under the strain and he capitulates, walking willingly into its warm embrace.  For she was all he’d ever wanted.  And now?  Now he has her, for ever, just as she promised him all those long years ago.

For there’s no-one left to stop him, even if they could.

  



End file.
